The Road Not Taken

I was telling a story today about some time I spent with the Navy SEALs. It's a fun story, and I've told it at least a dozen times since the summer of 1990 when it happened. A month after the story took place, one of my co-workers - one of our lead engineers - went off to kindergarten.

Life is fleeting, and if the statistics are right I'm about half way through.

Life is also absurd. Case in point: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie just sold pictures of their newborn twins for $14,000,000. Of course this is California money, so that's only about nine 2,000 square foot homes. It only gets worse when you realize that the reason someone paid that much is because they firmly believe that they can make a profit from them - that $14,000,000 is less than the pictures are really worth.

Make sure you know what you're striving for, and make sure it's worth it. Or be pretty and make babies.

Thoughts from the Walk

You will never love anyone or anything more deeply than you love God. If you do, you're mistaken about who your God is.

Waiting

I had a dream the other night about a thick, green-covered book called Christian Theology. I'd purchased the book a dozen years ago for a seminary course and hadn't looked at it since.

I found it on my bookshelf and put it on a table, and there it sat until I came home from work for lunch one day this week and cracked it open. Tucked inside the front cover was a photocopy of an article titled "Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language" by Langdon B. Gilkey. While I sat there eating my peanut butter sandwich and reading the article, I found myself uncontrollably weeping.

I weep when I read systematic theology. I thought I was done surprising myself.

Supernatural Aid

On Sunday, while waiting to go to the rehearsal for my best friend's wedding, my daughter and I goofed around outside. It's October in Massachusetts (just like most other places right now) and there was clover everywhere. So I explained to my daughter about the four-leaf variety and she wanted to look for one.

Aha, I thought to myself, the true purpose of the superstition -- it gave people something do while waiting before they'd invented the Nintendo DS.

After a few seconds of searching the hillside, I'd had about enough, and I told my daughter what we needed was a shamrock sensor. "You could sweep it around like this," I said, making beeping noises. She thought that was a great idea and began sweeping and beeping right along with me.

We laughed for a bit. Then I sighed and stopped and wondered how much more time we had to kill. She was still sweeping and beeping when I looked down and saw, looking right back up at me, a clover with four leaves.

I counted them again. Then I knelt down for a closer look and counted a third time. We picked it and rushed inside to find something to store it in. My daughter said, "Can we go look for another?"

I said, "Um, I think it's time to go."

In other news, I finished the first draft of my book today. It's a story about a young man growing up and learning what it means to be a hero in a world that doesn't always make sense. I need to take at least one more pass at it to clean it up, but it sure was fun writing it.

Here's hoping Sunday's event and today's event are somehow related.

color-coded demographics

I recently came into possession of one of these black 30GB video ipods. I explained to my daughter that we can watch TV shows on it. She got very excited and asked if it had 'girl's shows' on it.

"Sadly no," I said. "Those are on the pink ones."